Activision Blizzard on Cross-Play

Activision Blizzard – the giant American publisher behind titles such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, Destiny, and Diablo among others – has noted that it’s going to take “a lot of work” to bring cross-platform play to its boutique of video games.

“We’ve had a great experience with cross-play for Hearthstone on other platforms and have witnessed how compelling it can be for our community. There’s still a lot of work to do on both our side and the platform side to understand whether cross-play might be integrated into our other games, so we’ll be watching the upcoming test and will assess what the potential impact of this feature would be for our players and our games.”

The free-to-play collectible card game Hearthstone supports cross-platform play across its available platforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Since the game isn’t available on consoles, Activision Blizzard hasn’t run into Sony-driven issues around cross-platform play.

The ‘upcoming test’ the statement mentions is a reference to Sony’s policy reversal announcement on cross-platform play on Wednesday, stating that it would allow cross-platform play for Fortnite on PS4 with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, albeit with an open beta for “testing purposes” which “ensures cross-platform play is best on PlayStation”.

In the announcement, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO John Kodera added the company would share more details in the future, including “what this means for other titles going forward”. Just like Sony, it seems Activision Blizzard too is taking a wait-and-watch approach.